


A Different Sweetness

by Anonymous



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Angst and Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26362210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Francis's body registers it before his mind; well before it, as a matter of fact – hands suddenly shaking, a flutter rippling up his spine, sick and lukewarm.He stops, tries to blink himself back into the moment: he tells himself, very firmly, there is nothing, absolutelynothingthat should make him feel this undone, not even with his penchant for tragedy.
Relationships: Captain Francis Crozier/Commander James Fitzjames
Comments: 7
Kudos: 75
Collections: Fanfic Anonymous





	A Different Sweetness

Francis's body registers it before his mind; well before it, as a matter of fact – hands suddenly shaking, a flutter rippling up his spine, sick and lukewarm. 

He stops, tries to blink himself back into the moment: he tells himself, very firmly, there is nothing, absolutely _nothing_ that should make him feel this undone, not even with his penchant for tragedy. 

He and James and Ross are at the club, on a cloudy September afternoon, the clatter of hansom cabs and the rustle of passers-by carefully shut out by the window panes: each of them etched with the brambles of exotic flowers, as befitting the tea room of the Royal Society. Here, every member is to expected to recognize those specimens at first glance. 

( _He_ doesn't. he has spent years feeling the sharp inadequacy of it, the impression of still being the grass-smeared brat who collected snails and has tumbled here out of mere chance; he has dropped that inadequacy far away, alongside with several other layers of himself, in an oilskin tent where he had to choose between holding on to them and holding on the dying man in his arms. Francis has never had occasion to regret the bargain). 

The light in the club is gentle; it falls in shafts through the flowers of the windows, the color of newly-churned butter, and glints off the tea set laid out on the tablecloth before them. It glitters off the blue rim of the cake plate, the celebratory cake which neither he nor James will be able to finish, which Ross insisted on getting anyway. 

(Almond cake, flavored with vanilla beans: Francis's favorite from time immemorial. Ross remembered. An unexpected gift, to have such a secure place in the heart of this brilliant man even your trifles find a place in it.) 

_We are celebrating, Frank_ , Ross said earlier, swaying a little on his feet: reeling by proxy, probably. _I am already unable to toast with you and a good sherry, which make no mistake, I am_ overjoyed _not to be able to do – but you'll let me buy you a bloody cake, if nothing else._

James has followed their good-natured bickering with relish, nodding from behind fashionable locks that were finally outgrowing the ugly shortness of his sickbed. Against the will of two Jameses, Francis has stood no chance. 

So – this is it: they are celebrating, because they have reason to. They have walked out of the Admiralty, and the Court Martial: Francis has walked out of it, after having stood up and explained in precise detail the horror and the failure, every flaw, every wrong turn – all the pain and the hope which churned up to the surface in those days. He has summoned the names of those he has not brought back, and offered them to the gentlemen sitting at the table and glinting with epaulets; and he has managed to do that with his voice only breaking twice, with his shoulders never slumping. 

The names of the dead are still here, all of them, etched on the inside of his breastbone: but so are their courage and their decency. So is Blanky's hand squeezing his shoulder for a moment before he was called into the room ( _You say the word, Frank, and I will come in and personally spear their stiff arses with my new leg)_ ; so are James's eyes, steady on his shoulder blades for the whole time. Even, at a certain point, the blue shadows at his feet, reminding him of Sir John's bulk: finally listening to him, perhaps. 

By the end of the sitting Francis's palms were carved with the half-moons of his nails; the reflection in the glass in the anteroom showed him a pale, bruised-eyed ghost whom it took him a moment to reconcile with the man he daily sees as he shaves. 

He walked out of the Admiralty a free man; a renowned man, actually. Cleared now of the fame of shifty Irish drunk, the public is free to rename him a hero, to be awed by his deeds. He knows better: he has hazy plans of having the world know better to, at some point, if he ever manages to wrangle his thoughts into words (the slippery vagueness of them, and why can't you write your memories in algebra?). But right now, Londoners are allowed to cheer for those who came back; allowed to heal. They are _all_ allowed to heal. 

Especially one of the two men sitting eating cake; the one sitting slightly closer than it would be deemed proper, his knee a bony warmth against Francis's. 

Healing James requires lively conversation, like this; him being fed more of the tea, and more of the cake, and Francis supervising the operation and relishing it. He is grateful for all of this, and this is good, and healthy, and safe. 

Which is why the smell of the hot chocolate in Ross's cup shouldn't make Francis's breath catch like this. 

When it does, Francis feels a surge of white-hot rage that he would like to direct entirely towards himself. 

_Stop this._ It is the third time he's telling himself the words; he is quite sure he has already lost minutes of conversation, several of them, in the gray buzz growing in his temples. 

_Drop this nonsense this instant, Crozier._

Giving himself orders – not as sharply as he would have done once, but still firmly, treating his heart like the surly midshipman it is – usually works better than any genteel requests: now, it does not. The flutter is still there – spreading up his spine, into his chest: making it liquid. The smell of chocolate is still there as well. He feels it coat the inside of his mouth. A jagged memory: scavenging in their stores, kneeling over the bow of the sledges – the whiff of chocolate, powdery in the sunless air of the North, hard as rock. Food, and yet not food: their gums bleeding as they chewed through chocolate bars, and the taste mingling with the copper filling their mouths. Many of them would die with that taste on their tongue. Many would die with nothing else in their stomach. 

_I couldn't feed them_ , comes the thought, clear, unstoppable, shrill as a cry. _I can't feed them_. 

Heat bleeds out of Francis's face, pooling somewhere under his chair. His lips feel spongy with cold. He watches, the motion stretched obscenely out of shape, as Ross brings the cup to his lips: imagines his friend's gums going gray, dripping blood into the cup, on the tablecloth. He feels disjointed with fear. 

The room has gone around him. There is only the buzz now. It may be the creature, blotting out the sunlight at his back, coming to devour them all; it may be his pulse. 

"... Francis." 

That voice: he knew it, even in the roar of terrible things. James's voice is collected but urgent, and it is clear it is not the first time he calls his name. 

This won't do. This is not healing. Francis takes a breath; taps at his forehead, as if rubbing at a headache, to give the world time to coalesce into reasonable shapes. It does: Ross's mouth is not bleeding but turned in a straight line of alarm, the room's occupants warm and well-dressed. Francis knows he suffers from these spells of horror, the way they wash in and go like the tide: it is not the first time it happens. 

So he can't figure out why his body – the dense, compact tool which pulled him across half the unmapped nothing of King William's Land – is not bouncing back, too. He finds it is still shaking. He finds it is still terribly cold. 

"Francis." 

"I. I'm fine, James." 

"You are really not." 

Out of the corner his eye he sees James's long hand leave the napkin, brush at his, just over the wrist. 

"I am – all right, James. Truly." Francis feels his jaw work, the throat move with the words: he's reasonably sure he is the one who talked. His mouth is too dry to smile. Somewhere at his back, inside his head, the Tuunbaq prowls. "Just... distracted. Brooding. You know how I am." 

"Mh," says a second voice – a second James. His cup back on its saucer: eyes a live thing pressing steadily against his temple. 

" _Mh_ ," says the first James. His fingers are still lingering on Francis's forearm. He seems disinclined to put them anywhere else. Francis remembers the skull-faced thing he saw reflected in the mirrors of the Admiralty, triumphant but barely alive. He prays it is not the face looking back at James now. 

"Really, it is nothing–" 

"You've gone the exact shade of porridge, which I am quite certain is no healthy condition even for someone of your coloring." 

"I – I think I just feel a tad faint. I need some air." 

"Yes,"James says, smoothly," that sounds like a magnificent idea." He rises, in one fluid motion which should not be possible for a man who was agonizing in a frozen boat not half a year before. "And I am coming to get some air with you." 

"I don't–" 

"It was not an offer, Francis, but a statement." James's head turns graciously back to Ross. "I am sure Sir James will excuse us for a moment." 

"For all the moments you need, Mister Fitzjames," Ross answers without a single heartbeat of hesitation."Take all the time you need." 

Francis swallows. The buzz has bled into his sight, too: a vague grayness edging things in a fuzz. If it wasn't for the fuzz, for the monster prowling under his skin, he would have bristled at being treated like a toddler to be brought out when he gets fussy. But he _does_ feel faint – blinded by things which were not here. 

James guides him to his feet. He gently urges him forward. He finds himself moving like he did back on the ice: one foot in front of the other, swathes of nothing between them. 

They cross the room, into the foyer – people laughing and talking and shuffling, the funk of them – the lights blinding, the charts showing barely-explored lands over the heads of well-fed Londoners. 

It is hot, suddenly, smolderingly so: sweat collects in the hollow at Francis's collarbone, under the noose of his cravat. It is so cold: he is surprised by the rattle in his jaw, by his teeth chattering. Men, shaking with frostbite, with hunger: reaching out for him as they called their mothers. _Bread sir, please. Bread._ His empty hands. It is so cold, and there is nothing, nothing but chocolate, and he can't breathe he can't– 

_James,_ he calls. He doesn't know if he has said it out loud or only in his head. In any case, James answers. A pressure to his arm; a door thrown open, words whispered in his hair. A breath of fresh air with them, firm and real and _there_. 

"Almost here, almost here. Carry on ten more paces, Francis." 

This, he could do. One step, three, five. A green shade washing over them; a green smell in his next breath. They are out: _out,_ somewhere. 

Francis fumbles like a blind man, sleepwalks until his fingers find something solid to hold on: the comfort of stone as he leans against the wall, his cheek pressed to the coolness. 

He is shaking harder. He closes his eyes, and the greenness dances there, struggling not to turn into white pebbles. _Breathe_ , someone commands, and Francis, the terrified midshipman Francis in his heart, is still screaming, but obeys. He breathes. In, out. In, out. 

"There you are: like this," James says; a flush of relief at being able to do something to please him. 

James's hand has traveled to his back, splaying across his spine. It feels very important that he leaves it there. 

"I am–" 

"You are not all right. But right now you are breathing, which is no small improvement on our previous situation. I will not require anything else of you for at least a couple more minutes." 

_In, out._ The air he is gulping down is tender with freshness, the gentle hour before or after an English downpour: combined with the earlier sun, the earlier heat, the smell of grass and greenery rushes up to the sky in tremulous waves. It puzzles him: shouldn't the air be bone-dry, and gale-ridden, and so cold it burns – that you have to choose having no air and hurting with every breath? Is it not supposed to hurt, to stubbornly keep being alive? 

_It should_ , goes the creature: carrion smell in its roar. 

_It should_ _not_ , goes the other roar; the one fluttering and quick but still his, nestled in the space under his ribs. 

Slowly, as he passionately embraces the wall of the Royal Society and James leans on his cane to better rub at his back, Francis starts laboring less with his lungs. Starts having the space in his mind to notice things. There are flowers, under his feet: or a sprouting of new leaves, at least, bursting out of flower beds, beaded with rain. Grass, too, squelching under the tip of his boots. 

Further to his right – bricks, ivy vines; in the large window embedded in the wall, the image of bushes of berries and daffodils faintly reflected. 

They are in the gardens. The Society's gardens: desert, or at least desert now – he doesn't know if James glared other strollers into scattering away. He doesn't genuinely care either way. He has not spared half a thought to asking for his hat, of course: now he runs one hand through his hair. He starts when he finds it warm with sunlight. 

He keeps his eyes on the flower beds. His pulse is tattered against James's palm. They do no talk. Slowly, excruciatingly slowly, Francis Crozier relearns there can be places this kind in the world. 

The roar recedes: in waves, of sound and cold instead of green. _It should hurt. It shouldn't._

Then, it's over. Mostly over. Francis licks his lips; mutters a curse, a mild one. He contemplates the progress of a snail off the path and along the edge of his boot – a peninsula of Francis. It goes steady, trailing brightness. He wishes it all the best for its travels. 

When James's hand leaves his back and starts traveling upwards – up to his shoulder blades, his nape, resting on his hair – Francis leans into his touch. Should anyone see them now, it would be a disaster. Scandal and slander and disgrace, even if you have just been anointed a hero by London's toast. 

And yet – the gardens are desert; the grass and the flowers and the green and the snail circumnavigating his foot do not mind their tenderness. And if someone dares mind, dares demand entrance to the gardens right now, Francis feels sure they will have to dislodge James Ross from their way. 

James's voice is so close it brushes at his ear. 

"Are you with me, Francis?" 

Peculiar phrasing. A code: James knows where he has been, these past minutes. He knows there are ways back from the plains of the Island, from the pebbles and the ice; He knows the way back isn't always the less tortuous, or the most painless. 

"I – I am," Francis says. His voice is weak as a chick. 

"Good." James's fingers card through his hair. "Always glad to have you back. What happened?" 

Francis's eyes flutter closed again. "Nothing," he says. "A...a most silly thing, really." 

"This will not suffice, and you know it." 

"Really, James – it's, it's nothing. Less than nothing." 

"That was hardly nothing," James replies. There is a new sharpness in his voice, an edge of a blade, but it is not meant for Francis. "I very much doubt _nothing_ would have caused you to lose every drop of color in your face and practically fold over with terror in a handful of seconds. Christ, I even thought you were having a stroke." 

James almost never swears: his bouts of cussing, like Francis's prayers, are to be taken into account carefully and meditated upon. 

Francis forces himself to crack his eyes open again; to twist his head and meet James's expression. 

"I am sorry to have worried you," he says. Which, he realizes belatedly is the most unfortunate thing he could have said. 

"I do not give a _damn_ about worrying," James says, a smooth crack of a whip. "I am more than all right with it; but I would like to know what made you so frightened, Francis, I really do. So that I know too – as the things that manage to scare you are worthy close observation from the rest of us too." The hand in his hair stops, pulls him closer to James's dark gaze. "So that I know how to keep them away from you." 

It almost undoes Francis: undo him in a good way, pulling free the tight things coiled inside him, like slowly unfurling a closed fist. 

"It was the chocolate," he hears himself say. 

James doesn't blink. He doesn't pretend to understand, either. He simply nods, as if to say, _go on: I know there is more._

"When Ross's chocolate came out, and I smelled it – I, I do not know. I remembered those days – the ones before his sledges came and rescued us. There was nothing to feed us, feed the men, nothing but whatever Silna brought us and the bloody chocolate. 

I remember when I was a child, how we jostled to get to the chocolate tarts my father brought home from Belfast: in the North I saw men, grown men, weep with despair as they were handled squares upon squares of the stuff. And I was quite sure I could do it, could endure it, and by God, I spent a morning answering every excruciating detail the Admirals wanted from me, giving them everything, every man I left there on the ground and every miserable choice and every sacrifice, and then I saw my friend order a bloody chocolate as we chatted about his children and I couldn't–" 

Francis trails off: words fail him again, crumble away somewhere between his chest and his tongue. He widens his eyes, makes a gesture with his hands: a grabbing, coming back with nothing but air. 

"That place took even _chocolate_ from us, can you believe?" 

He is shaking again: he would like to say out of outrage, he suspects not because of it. He does not look at James's face. He cannot. 

For a moment, the silence is excruciating. _Now, now he will walk away,_ the silence seems to suggest. This is James peeling himself away from you, this is him crossing the threshold; this is him, excising you from his life like a gangrenous limb. Francis squashes down the terror at the thought; braces for it. 

Then James is moving; but not away. Instead he presses their bodies together. He rests his chin on the top of Francis's head. 

"It is not as much of a loss as it may look," he says: conversationally. "There are many other desserts we can still enjoy: one thing the English cannot be faulted for, is our ability to come up with disgustingly sweet concoctions. We can still have lemon tarts, treacle, toffee; ice cream; your beloved almond cake. Plum tarts. Pudding." 

"I don't like pudding," Francis says without thinking. 

"Which makes you a terrible Englishman and an incorrigibly contrary man, but it is no capital sin." James draws Francis's head back against his shoulder, more firmly. He is still talking with his nose in his hair. "I think I will be able to forgive you, after all." 

"You will?" Francis asks. 

_What to ask forgiveness for? For the cold, for the months of misery and slushy torpor. For the ones who were lost before we even left the ships; the ones that tardiness fated to death. For the horror, and the evil I didn't shield any of you from._

_For the man who came back, shaking at the sight of a cup of chocolate, who's probably less than what I was out there._

"Of course I will forgive you, Francis," James says, quietly. "There is much more than chocolate to this life." 

"Mph. Not your best aphorism." 

Francis says it arching his eyebrows, for maximum effect. James gives a chuckle. This moment, stretched into endlessness: the only kind of eternity Francis think he could believe in. 

"I'm better, now," Francis says quietly, a certain time later, less than one full eternity. "We can go back in." 

"You _want_ to?" 

A tap to his hand. Francis compelled to sincerity. 

"Not really. Not yet." 

James nods. "Very well. I am confident Sir James's exquisite manners will compel him from eating away all the cake before our return." 

Francis hums in agreement; closes his eyes. Green and blue dance behind his eyelids – the freshness of the grass, the shade of James's jacket. Things to rebuild a world around. 

He feels drained. He feels disjointed, full of spare pieces that fit nowhere. The roar is still there, somewhere, but it's not devouring everything else. It is still less real than this – than the green, the blue. 

_It should hurt. It shouldn't_ . 

Today, he decides, he doesn't care if it does. 


End file.
